Jojo Iznart <[email protected]> wrote:
> It took me some time to find it but here are some: > > > 1. Living Mollusk Shells dated 2300 years old - Science vol 141, pp634-637 > > 2. Freshly Killed Seal dated 1300 years old - Antarctic Journal vol 6, > Sept-Oct `971 p.211 > > 3. Shells from Living snails dated 27,000 years old - Science Vol 224, > 1984 p58-61 > You can find problems with any instrument or any experimental technique. Any instrument has limitations. Any instrument can be used incorrectly. I have seen thermocouples register room temperature as hundreds of degrees. The Defkalion setup registered a flow rate when the flow was zero. Some types of mass spectrometers show complete nonsense when the sample does not conduct electricity, or when it is made up of small particles not in good contact with one another. Even the tools used in industry and in critical control applications sometimes produce false data. That is why Air France flight 447 fell out of the sky and crashed in the Atlantic. No instrument is perfect. This is why experimental findings have to be independently replicated before we can be sure they are real. What you are describing will not surprise anyone familiar with science and technology, or for that matter anyone who know how to cook, drive a car, or use of a blood pressure monitor. Blood pressure monitors often come up with wild readings, completely off the scale, for no apparent reason. You ignore these readings and try again. You seem to be concluding that because instruments sometimes fail to work, we can never believe them, and we should dismiss all the findings from them. I do not think you would say that no one can measure blood pressure, so we should ignore a diagnosis of hypertension. You would not say that because on rare occasions automobile speedometers fail, we should not have speed limits, and everyone should drive as fast as they like. The fact that carbon dating sometimes fails with some types of samples, in the hands of some people, does not mean that carbon dating never works or that it is meaningless. This means that archaeologists have be careful when they do carbon dating. They have to run some samples twice; they have to run some samples with known ages; and they have someone else do an independent reading on some samples. Every cold fusion experiment I have investigated was checked independently by several others, for similar reasons. - Jed
